Welcome!

Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 Egyptian campaign was driven by a mix of strategic objectives and personal ambition. Determined to disrupt British trade routes and gain influence in the East, Napoleon also nurtured a deep fascination with Alexander the Great, envisioning himself as a modern heir to the ancient conqueror’s legacy. He believed that by conquering this gateway to Asia, he could cement his own place in history. While his military venture ultimately faltered, the expedition inspired one of the most significant scientific and cultural studies of its time, leaving an indelible mark on our understanding of Egypt....

Humble started off small, long before oil turned it into a boomtown. Joseph Dunman was thought to be the first to settle here in 1828, and he was soon followed by folks like Pleasant Smith Humble—“Plez”—who arrived just before the Civil War. Plez built a ferry crossing along the San Jacinto River, served as justice of the peace, and eventually opened a post office in his home in 1886, cementing the Humble name for good....

I’ve been using ComfyUI to enhance photos from a set of over 300 aerial balloon photographs taken by the U.S. Army’s 14th Photo Section during World War I. These images are part of a bigger archive that shows everything from ruined towns to giant trenches carved across the countryside, all captured from balloons tethered high above the Western Front. What I love about these shots is how they’re basically a window into a time when aerial photography was just getting off the ground....

Süleymanname is an illustrated manuscript chronicling the life and achievements of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Unfortunately, while copies exist and there are photographs of the illustrations, they are poor in both resolution and lighting. In this post, we’ll look at the first 10 images from Süleymanname detailed with AI. Take a look here to see all the original images with more descriptions about the scenes. Click here for the Wikipedia article about the book....

London Street Views There was recently a post on Hacker News that linked to a Map Collection showing a bunch of scans from a surveying book for London from the 1840s. I ran these through my ‘Enhance!’ ComfyUI workflow to imagine what these might look like in color. This is still using SDXL but I’m keen to try to update it to Flux when I have a chance. That should improve the text fidelity quite a bit I believe....